ORIGINAL POST, DEC. 20, 2:36 P.M.: As you may have noticed since the tragic shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, Navel Gazing has been overcome by this foreign feeling of public service, sharing with our mostly spent adult ad readers the school safety communications local police and school officials have been sharing with their communities. The latest comes from San Juan Capistrano City Councilman and frequent Navel Gazing pinata Derek Reeve and, as anyone who knows of his past mouth farts would imagine, it is ... ahem ... unique.

He then offers three suggestions to keep local kids safe, the first being to train teachers with the help of police and firefighters on what to do in an active-shooter situation, as they do with fire and earthquake drills.

That's actually a pretty damn good idea, as is Reeve's third suggestion: improve fencing around the entire perimeter of schools, keep all gates locked except for one central entry point and have only one entry to classrooms, which would remain locked while in session.

Brilliant!

It's the suggestion Reeve has sandwiched between those two that is sure to raise eyebrows:

Arm willing staff, teachers and/or parents. Alternatively hire armed security: There exists an understandable emotional response that if we just prevent firearms from being on campus, no shootings will ever occur. This attitude is tragically naïve. Someone intent on murdering dozens of children has no fear of a sign informing him that bringing a firearm to school is a felony. Every mass shooting in recent history has occurred in a "gun free zone." These shooters tend to cower from armed confrontation and commit suicide as soon as they are confronted by armed resistance.

Reeve notes the first option would not cost anything because willing teachers and volunteers would already have firearms and, presumably, the correct training on how to use them. The councilman adds that securing firearms in classrooms would be easy, a dubious claim, given schools can't even keep the smart kids from hacking into computers to change grades.

Anyway, he says the alternative would be hiring campus guards, which he acknowledges would cost money but, in any event, he demands they be armed.

UPDATE, DEC. 20, 5:17 P.M.: The Capistrano Unified School District response to Reeve's second suggestion was short and sweet, with spokesman Marcus Walton explaining the school system "will not entertain any proposal to have staff persons carry firearms."

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.